Ken Hall: Punditry should take a lesson from sports

The San Francisco Giants played the Detroit Tigers in the World Series this year because they had winning records and defeated other teams with winning records.

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By Ken Hall

recordonline.com

By Ken Hall

Posted Nov. 29, 2012 at 2:00 AM

By Ken Hall
Posted Nov. 29, 2012 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

The San Francisco Giants played the Detroit Tigers in the World Series this year because they had winning records and defeated other teams with winning records.

Obvious, I know, but please stick with me.

When the New York Mets played the Florida Marlins in Miami on Oct. 3, everybody knew that the final score of this final game did not matter because the two were among the worst teams in baseball.

Obvious again, but there are two more steps before I get to my points.

Manchester City and Manchester United were on top of the Premier League soccer standings, last I looked, because they had the best records.

If the Queens Park Rangers, now at the bottom of the soccer standings, keep on with their losing ways, they could be bumped down — the preferred term is "relegated" — to the inferior Football League and have to earn their way back up.

Point number one: Major League Baseball might benefit from such a system. The Mets might try harder if they risked being reduced to minor league status and some minor league team could take their place in the big leagues.

Point number two: The major world sport — soccer — and the major American sport — baseball — may differ on how they punish or reward teams, but both agree that results count.

Leading to this conclusion: If the world understands this when it applies to sports, which, after all, do not really make a difference no matter how much we yell, how about applying the same standards to the players in our other national pastime — political punditry?

The track records of many who appear on the Sunday talk shows and the daily shouting matches are embarrassing, or would be if anybody kept score.

George Will, for example, predicted a Romney electoral landslide, 321 to 217.

The actual result, for those who like to keep track of actual numbers, was 332 to 206 in the other direction. My shaky reporter math skills are not good enough to calculate just how wrong he was.

But he was worse than whatever that turns out to be because he predicted that Romney would win Minnesota along the way.

Leaving Will in his usual spot on "This Week" is the equivalent of putting the Hudson Valley Renegades in the World Series. Yet there he stays, because nobody keeps track and nobody pays the price — well, nobody except those who fool themselves into believing impossible predictions because they find more comfort in them than in reality.

To earn a spot in the premiere league of punditry — the major networks — Will should at least have a winning record. Without one, he should be bumped down to the next level, the top 10 local media markets from New York to Houston. Do badly there, and he could end up down in the next lowest tier, which could prove very interesting, because that includes the Minneapolis-St. Paul market. Lots of people there would love to call in and ask where he gets such lousy information.